The Armenian Highlands was an important center of early human technological and agricultural inventions. Situated at the crossroads between Europe, Middle East and Asia it served as a geographic conduit for the spread of technology and genetics into Europe during the Neolithic revolution when humans first abandoned hunting and gathering and started to settle down. The […]
Origin of Indoeuropeans
Tracing the diffusion of Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age cultures and peoples from the Middle East to Europe through DNA.
Dans mon précédent billet j’avais traité de la sortie de notre espèce du continent africain en revenant notamment sur deux ou troi...
La Grande Table reçoit la paléoanthropologue Silvana Condemi, directrice de recherche au CNRS, co-auteure de l'enquête "Néandertal, mon frère" aux éditions Flammarion (octobre 2016).
Why do so many large, dangerous animals live in Africa? Why are we so fascinated by monsters? The answers may lie in our past, when our ancestors lived alongside Africa's real monsters.
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The Pleistocene presence of the genus Homo in continental Southeast Asia is primarily evidenced by a sparse stone tool record and rare human remains. Here we report a Middle Pleistocene hominin specimen from Laos, with the discovery of a molar from the Tam Ngu Hao 2 (Cobra Cave) limestone cave in the Annamite Mountains. The age of the fossil-bearing breccia ranges between 164–131 kyr, based on the Bayesian modelling of luminescence dating of the sedimentary matrix from which it was recovered, U-series dating of an overlying flowstone, and U-series–ESR dating of associated faunal teeth. Analyses of the internal structure of the molar in tandem with palaeoproteomic analyses of the enamel indicate that the tooth derives from a young, likely female, Homo individual. The close morphological affinities with the Xiahe specimen from China indicate that they belong to the same taxon and that Tam Ngu Hao 2 most likely represents a Denisovan. Evidence for the presence of Homo during the Middle Pleistocene is limited in continental Southeast Asia. Here, the authors report a hominin molar from Tam Ngu Hao 2 (Cobra Cave), dated to 164–131 kyr. They use morphological and paleoproteomic analysis to show that it likely belonged to a female Denisovan.
Everyone living outside of Africa today has a small amount of Neanderthal DNA. Oxford University Professor of Archaeological Science Tom Higham explains some of the traits we’ve inherited from our ancient evolutionary relatives.
Humans moving out of Africa for the first time went to the Arabian peninsula and new research has found that this happened 100,000 years earlier than previously thought.
Analyses of ancient DNA from prehistoric humans paint a picture of dramatic population change in Europe from 45,000 to 7,000 years ago.
Scientists working in Denisova Cave have found something truly astonishing -- a first-generation hybrid between two extinct groups of humans.
migrations
Tracing the diffusion of Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age cultures and peoples from the Middle East to Europe through DNA.
Tracing the diffusion of Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age cultures and peoples from the Middle East to Europe through DNA.
For a long time, the only evidence we had of an ancient, proto-Indo-European culture was the fact that many European and Asian languages evidently belonged to the same family, sharing a basic grammatical structure and etymology. By the method of comparative linguistics, scholars since the 19th century have been working on comparing languages in order…
Map of Final Neolithic / Chalcolithic: Yamnaya, Afanasievo, Usatovo, GAC, Vucedol, Corded Ware, Single Grave, Kura-Araxes, Indus Valley
